After money was sold down the river and resurrected on a cross of blood
After a cash-loaded God strolled into town
After the Universal Hospital drugged synapses and drove the wild horses of imagination down into underground canyons
and sculpted androids stepped out in the aftermath buying back their own memories
geologic wraiths spiraled up inside television sets---
their only ambition to stunt prayers for deliverance and kill raw desire---
we
watched wildcats of Texas dripping sweat into their high hats pull
black blood out of the ground and send it through tubes of night to
porcupine refineries on the shores of the Body of Christ
apostles
were resurrected in knife-cutter fins of long Cadillacs running hot
across the Kansas plains with blondes in the back seat drinking
New
horizontal towns were multiplying on Long Island, stage flats of
perfect geometry coddled in the breasts of hopeful mothers asking for
redemption from pill-addled afternoons and hallucinatory music cooking
in shining ovens
monthly budgets laid out neatly on Formica counters below the knives
distant farm fields dead in the snow
blank-eyed children walking in the snow
cultivating nightmares they would one day visit on Reality
I flew over those fields and heard the crackerbox houses rot and rust as nothing ever rotted before
We tamed the wolf and the copperhead
we
broke a pond of ice and sent Promethean serpents to force a tunnel all
the way down to the volcanic hats of ancient Chinese poets
We tracked mobs and gangs and politicians and drowned them in thunderous secret rivers under the Southwest deserts
we
launched charges against the bosses and carried our prosecutions into
courtrooms of fish eye and coral and waving undersea weeds and dragged
paid-off judges from their galleon-wrecked thrones
We
stood in the blinding sunlight reflected from low slung whitewashed
buildings of Pasadena and El Segundo and Long Beach and felt the roar of
departing space rockets cutting tunnels through the future and pulling
back the future with giant magnets of illuminated dust
We
walked through measureless windows of wheat and corn growing in the
middle flatlands under the warm rain of supernatural mansions
We
draped curtains of night in the upper hills of Los Angeles where the
mountain lion and the coyote and the melted mythical Greek beast roamed
like vagabonds free of the Wheel
Under poles of yellow lights, gasping midnight locomotives clamped on to lines of freight cars in the backyards of Chicago
Plastic lilies grew in the pastures of St. Louis haberdashers and department stores
In
White Plains we carved a diamond on cracked asphalt and climbed a
decaying elm and walked along the iron railing of the fence holding
rotting branches and threw marbles down on to Davis Avenue and watched
them bounce into the muddy stream of World War Two newspapers and
swollen milk cartons and broken whiskey bottles and torn black jackets
of old soldiers who had died in snow drifts over the winter and
mysteriously disappeared
I ran under trees filled with light green inchworms hanging from long threads until I was invisible
and glimpsed smiling robots sitting in cafes in the next platinum century
In
Los Angeles, concrete sunset of three stacked freeways, a carpet of
park in Beverly Hills, old poolroom on Broadway downtown, bus to San
Francisco, a bum holding out his hand and saying On Venus Jesus will
show you machines of love
I saw politicians jumping out of floating windows
their briefcases cracking open
spilling secrets like lazy snowflakes
dazzling in the sun
trillion dollar thefts
naked amazons stashed in condos and yachts
banks sucking money from the vacuum of the heavens
dead agents
in a rock pasture outside Des Moines hitchhiking to New York
glimpses of prehistoric time
before
the beginning before the beginning of sacred money before the first
idols were built, before sacrifice was thought of, sly prophets were
trying on robes and combing out their long hair and rehearsing their
future executions
Standing
up on a hill past Albuquerque on 66, I caught a ride into a no-name
Arizona town, walked in the foggy morning along an empty road to a
pine-filled snow-filled cliff and stared out at a spring valley a
thousand feet below
In
blinding rain I stood on the Indiana Turnpike outside Chicago pointed
east and wound up in the Pennsylvania countryside driving the car of a
half-crippled man with a Bible I met in a Howard Johnson
our headlights went dead on a curve and a cop pulled in behind us and stopped us
he led us to a fat judge's house in the middle of the night where we paid thirty bucks
then parked on a quiet lane and slept until dawn
early spring in March
flowering magnolia trees
he dropped two Thorazine and told me to drive
and his babbling about Heaven slowed down and he slept
and when we pulled into Manhattan he had me park in midtown
he looked at me with glazed doe's eyes and said
son, I've reached the end of the line, this is it, within a month I'll kill myself
I
walked along the astral cloisters of Wall Street among crowds lapping
at honey loopholes in a web of proprietary secrets and I flew through
steel walls into the psychotic fandango of the international electronic
invented money Surge
I
recorded architects laying out blueprints for the perfect human in
bunkers of Virginia where silent factories printed minds whose memories
could be selectively erased
technicians
built new bodies from tendons and ligaments of cougars and predatory
owls and membranes from soldier ants and feral dogs
I walked through fields of cactus east of Tijuana
into caverns of mass graves where sacrificed Aztec skeletons still stank in pulsing blood rhymes of a toothless hobo Ziggurat
I
sat in the courtroom where the two-hundred-year trial of America
labored like a wounded beast, witness after witness screaming
accusations at captains of production and dark iron-masked prosecutors
hammered their fists on tables and smooth Rockefeller men sat in the
witness box and advocated drugging the population
One
Sunday night I walked out of a small bookstore on 3rd Avenue and a
drunken Ben Franklin, wearing his waistcoat and slippers, his spectacles
halfway down his crooked nose, pulled me over to the doorway of a paint
store, and whispered:
“I should prefer, to an ordinary death, being immersed
with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time,
then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my
dear country!”
he patted me on the cheek and grinned
What about the weathered Declaration on which you staked your honor, your future, your fortune, your life, I ask him
His face turns sour
Oh that, he says
They sold it for a war, and it fetched a handsome price
They sold it for a bank, and rated it a fair exchange
They sold it for a choking nightmare called the greater good, and it drained their living blood
They sold it for a legend of heaven under a burning copper sky and it vaporized in the whirlwind
Fifty million video cameras record the washed out moment-to- moment ballet in streets and offices
people stop for a moment in a bulging tableau
light peers in through immobile troughs of fury
complaints are frozen
all the children of America with their endless needs are frozen
We slashed our way through faded blue Virginia mountain ranges ruled by subhuman priests
lizards crawled through the sunlight between leaves on rumbling trees spreading out their knuckles above ground
Through dream gardens of the starlit Sagittarius, coral horses, amber-fed lichen
we walked the Cherokee Trail glittering with bodies frozen in the silver fog
We
flew over steaming cities and freezing cities and came to the Asia
plain of tropical magic where the walls of enduring space were cracked
and broken and the false curtain of the sky lay at half-mast torn and
stained
Here the empire had shriveled and small mobs wandered under saturated space broken off from the Maypole of trance
We still hear a voice of freedom
in the
aether
now freedom barks like a dog
it weeps over stones
it demands cash
it lies in the mud and croaks
flees a burning church
On a parapet at the center of an unknown city, we hear a bovine preacher of the sub-brain announce:
ADORE! ADORE!
We have
A
New
God
And
Time
Is
Peeling off
Around him.
ADORE! ADORE!
Your life
Is being
Mapped out
In steel-banded
Central Planning
Operating
From
The Temple
Of the Just
A gram of license
For every ton of compliance
This is the new energy equation
One
Glittering
Breath
Of
Spontaneously inhaled
Stolen
Money
leveled like an exploding shell
o leader
your only remaining job
is the calculation
of the religious component
how to mountaintop
and sell that vacation view
theocratic meteors
whirling around the crown
what testament
and scripture
will you
invent
for the made-holy parade
of intercellular
electronic
money laundering
(left hand to the right)
how will you
market
the ark
of androids
what murders
will you
recast
as
sacrifices
made
on behalf of
the
rising
membership
in the
temple
of
those
seeking
justice
a node
of memoryless
cold blue light
shining on
citizens
entranced
in trust
Adore!
Adore!
The rebellion is over!
Everything
We hoped for
Granted!
Now
By the blessed
Eye
Capture and Love are the same!
Their
Separation
Was
Our
Sin
We
Surrender
To
The Egoless
Cage
Adore! Adore!
All
Objections
Are
Swept away
This
Is
Our
Day
Our
Hope
Has Been
Justified
In the
Temperament
Of
The Wise
Who
Unleash
A hurricane
To catapult us
Into
The new world
Adore! Adore!
One shapeless limp impulse
Desperately shared by nine billion people
Dissolves
The threshold
Of mystery
And opens at last
The door
To
The everlasting
Life
This is the apotheosis of
What
We have all
Been unconsciously seeking
I see populations surge through golden avenues wrapped around the upper stories of Orphic ships waiting for solar winds
I open books in a shining arboretum, ten-thousand-foot wells pour
from the sky down into stratified layers of rock...
Summer night on an old porch, rhododendrons are thrashed by slow comets of rain
there is a sleep so pervasive numbing the chest and shoulders, a despair so charming as to be final, a titanic loss of mobility
there
were buildings in the old World War 2 Paris that looked like beautiful
rotting vegetables propped on the ark of the River windows scalloped
stone sacred mucosal choirs
in a nostalgic vortex
death is a protocol
a virginal reopening of the wound
insignia piping gardens from its royal wax
into the dark
old pleasures run in familiar magnetic channels
Ah, this is old-world death, the happiness of remembering time, a thing of wonder in the thrall of dying autumn
and then we knew what could be lost, and then we knew we were seeing each other fading on sheets of papyrus
and we dropped through the earth
flaming
into the legend of the unconscious
and [...]
~~~
(The link to the complete Poem posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Gab at @jonrappoport)
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